Sheila began to muse aloud, saying she envied Monica her books, these particular books (orange-spined Penguin copies of the Brontës, Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope), they were so dog-eared and worn, so marked with underlinings and annotations, it was obvious their reader had not simply read the novels but had lived through them. Of what value was a novel, Sheila asked, if one couldn’t live through it?—if it were only a matter of words skillfully arranged? She was herself so caught up in her work, not trapped, exactly, but caught up, immersed, for years she had been obsessed with “figuring certain problems out visually,” she had all but abandoned reading; she had certainly abandoned these leisurely, massive, world-embracing Victorian novels. And she envied the form itself. She envied a profession that concerned itself with books, pages, print. The printed line, after all, is so orderly and chaste, so chronologically determined—that is, the reader is obliged to read line by line, page by page, in sequence; very unlike the visual image, which assaults the eye out of nowhere, in a manner of speaking, with no preparation, and no power over the viewer to demand from him more than a moment’s casual contemplation. How it sickened her, how it drove her wild, to observe patrons of art museums as they drifted and dallied along, their eyes brushing against masterpieces, skimming a row of paintings by Vermeer or Monet or Mondrian, it scarcely mattered, the human eye is so unintelligent, so uninformed. . . . And of course being present when her own paintings were on display was torture. . . .

Monica ventured timidly to agree. She could imagine the strain, she doubted that she herself would ever have had the courage to risk such exposure. Even if, she added, she had faith in her talent. That is—if she had talent.

Sheila chose to ignore this haphazard remark. She was musing, thinking aloud: “. . . Morton used to say there was something wholly sane about a book . . . because there is something finite about it. The book, no matter its length, encompasses a complete world. It is a world. But it displaces virtually no space in this world. Consider its size, its weight . . . set beside a massive piece of sculpture or a large canvas. God, how I envy that. The compression, the modesty . . . the sanity. . . .”

She rose rather unsteadily to her feet and fumbled in her jodhpurs pocket for something—a package of cigarettes, most likely—which wasn’t there. Her fingers came away vexed, stymied. She said suddenly that she had better be going, a houseguest was expected at Edgemont that evening, she hadn’t prepared anything, in any case she had intruded upon Monica long enough. . . . Monica naturally protested that she had not intruded at all. She had only arrived, really; wouldn’t she care to sit down for five minutes and rest? . . . wouldn’t she like another glass of iced tea?